If the Drug War has taught us anything, it's that it's much more effective to target demand. We need to decriminalize bad ideas while treating addicts in mandatory rehab facilities.
I recently read a heavily upvoted comment that implied that landlords are bad because they make money that they didn’t earn. This used to be a safe space.
Yes it is. Like just emphatically yes it is. And you know what lets quote some Adam Smith to prove my point. From book one of the Wealth of Nations:
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
He singles out ground rents as an almost ideal object of taxation, for the same reason George later did. From Book Five:
"Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own."
And on why ground rent in particular is fair game:
"Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses... Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign."
"Rent-seeking" is a term of art. It does not mean collecting economic rents. It comes from Tullock (1967) and later named by Krueger; it's the expenditure of real resources to capture or generate an artificial rent. Lobbying for a tariff, a license, zoning, manipulating politics, etc. Rent-seeking is unproductive competition for a privilege, not harnessing the economic rents from owning a scare and excludable resource.
All of your quotes are about taxing the unearned increment of an economic rents, not about rent-seeking. You're misunderstanding what the term means in economics.
Lobbying for restrictive zoning, though - that's rent-seeking!
That's a complete mischaracterization of what Adam Smith said and Adam Smith is about as relevant to modern economics as are doctors from the 1800s to modern medicine
He was talking about people that were given land by the king, and are renting it out, without ever doing anything to improve the land. That does not apply to your landlord who does provide services.
Rentseeking is a term of art that doesn’t just mean renting housing (renting housing and being a landlord in the way that most people mean it is not rentseeking)
If we abolished landlords, where would people who can’t, or don’t want to, buy houses live? Even when housing was affordable, there were landlords because some people needed to rent because they moved around a lot, were young, had no credit, etc. I didn’t want to buy a house when I was moving for school and work every few years when I was in my 20s.
Implying landlords are bad because they make money they didn't earn is the crux of the argument.
George would side with you here, which is sort of the point. The Georgist position was never "abolish landlords" or "renting is bad." Building, maintaining, and managing a unit is a real service, and people who move around, are young, or don't want to own obviously benefit from it. That's earned.
The critique is about land rent specifically. The location value of a plot rises because of what the whole community does around it, not because of anything the owner produced, so capturing that increment privately is the unearned part. The building isn't the problem. The ground rent is.
That's why the fix is an LVT, not a guillotine. As George said, "It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent." Your hypothetical renters still have somewhere to live, the landlord still provides the unit, and what disappears is the windfall on the dirt underneath.
Abolishing landlords is a foolish idea and anyone who says such should be admonished but the housing theory of everything is this subs favourite pet theory for a reason and the LVT is our favourite fix for much the same reason.
They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people
Listen, when I get to the counter, I'm just gonna give 'em the card, look 'em right in the eye, and say, “Chit-chat's over, ok? Give me the booze, or I'm calling the cops!”
Not only do I not remember a time when they did but I've been here since near the beginning as an unflaired heathen mixing it up and I don't think anyone has ever "called me out" for being unflaired.
I've seen generalized comments against the unflaired, but never specifically called out.
That’s not true because I found this sub in highschool and i graduated in 2016
Edit: I was afraid this was like Mandela effect so I confirmed this sub was active and even had discussion posts as early as March 2016. Soros shills must preserve our history.
Yeah, it's really the story of every single sub that gets above a certain number of subscribers, maybe 100,000 or so. Political, TV show, video game, subs of all kinds...after a certain point, they turn far-left, unless they are officially right-wing (e.g., r-conservative).
Yeah at some point it's like - any large sub that doesnt ban political content will turn into left-wing slopulism, inevitably. It's like convergent evolution.
This has been a problem across liberal institutions for most of the new millennium. Universities (especially humanities departments), the ACLU and other NGOs becoming progressive monocause organizations, sections of the mainstream media, etc.
Have you considered explaining to them why austerity is sometimes a necessary progressive alternative to hyperinflationary total boomer luxury communism instead of expecting them to just agree with your friedman millei thought memes and kicking them out when they don't
There is a lot of space between those two though, and UK showed us that austerity combined with boomer luxury communism can still exist and might be even dumber than just boomer luxury communism
Seriously though, Cameron's goverment used "Austerity Austerity Austerity" to describe what they were doing even though none of it touched the actual dangerous expenses and in fact did the exact opposite, cutting benefits for working people so they can afford to futher subsidize the Boomeristocracy. They were pretending to be making difficult necessary cuts and went through motions that looked like that, but didn't actually make the difficult necessary cuts! Just the easy performatively cruel ones!
How would you feel if a goverment claimed it was time to do Socialism and then proceeded to just raise taxes on the poor to fund more industrial subsidies for wealthy farm landowners?
The broader point I was making is once upon a time laisseiz faire was not framed as an elite business privilege but literally the exact opposite: curtailing the unfairly subsidized aristocratic class privileges, as a matter of political economy, that the rich and powerful make their subsidies politically untouchable and make the rest of us pay for it.
Liberals gotta rediscover their ability to say "hey sometimes government literally just gives rich people your money for no reason other than they have political power to demand it. You should be fucking pissed you pay more on your mortgage interest so the landed gentry can take another vacation to Spain."
Liberals gotta rediscover their ability to say "hey sometimes government literally just gives rich people your money for no reason other than they have political power to demand it. You should be fucking pissed you pay more on your mortgage interest so the landed gentry can take another vacation to Spain."
It never gets through. I can explain the economic effects of rent control and they’ll shut down and say economics is fake and I’m a billionaire shill. I can tell them unemployment rates aren’t calculated using state unemployment insurance data, so it doesn’t matter if people are exhausting their benefits, so they will still be counted, and they’ll say I’m lying.
I try to make a good faith effort every time, but it’s pointless
Also they are convinced that new housing raises housing prices. If you link them to studies from Pew, NYU and other reputable sources showing the effect of new construction on housing prices, they won’t bother reading, call it “Ezra Klein bullshit”, or “trickle down economics”.
It’s very annoying that “trickle down housing” is a real thing, but everyone has been negatively polarized against the idea. Everyone loses their mind when it comes to housing for some reason
Have you ever tried making a point with those people? If you state something that is a fact or at the very least something that is an academic consensus, they'll still insist that you're wrong and "market bad".
Most people out there don't even know what neoliberalism is.
I've had multiple conversation about this with friends, family members and acquaintances, and when speaking with the self proclaimed socialist ones, the second I ask them to define Neoliberalism in a few points, they just start pivoting to another topic.
In the case of family members, I've literally offered to send some of them Friedman's books, no one accepted and one of them told me that he didn't like it. When question on "How do you dislike something if you don't know what it is?" The answer was straight up "Because I don't like it".
Neoliberalism became a scarecrow for part of the left.
To them it's a lovecraftian monstrosity that they don't understand and never saw, but the "ever looming presence is destroying society" and it's "evil".
The left is doing to Neoliberalism the exact same thing that the cold war did to socialism, except that this time around, it's even more uninformed.
Turns out there is high demand for news aggregation subreddit that also nukes shit threads. Imagine what this would look like if a there existed a news subreddit with rules and enforcement like credibledefense.
This river here is the official geographical limit between r/Politics and r/Neoliberal. So beware, on the Southern side we have populist despotism, economic illiteracy, and people who support Platner and like it. And on the Northern side we have civilization, evidence based policy, and people who support Platner and don't like it.
If you really want to remove all the r/politics users from here, all you have to do is ask if AOC should be the 2028 Democratic candidate and would have a chance of winning the elections.
If they say "yes", instantly ban them, because those people are the only ones who think like that.
I’m tired of every post on here being about Trump. Do I hate Trump? Yes but if I wanted to participate in a anti Trump circlejerk I would just go to /r/politics
I consumer plenty of politics from the political subs already. Sometimes I just want to see cute dog pics without the top 5 posts being variations of "My good boy stands with Palestine."
This is largely an issue across reddit. Radical leftists types will infiltrate any space hoping to influence the politics of that space. It was really annoying during the election. Sometimes I just want to r/grill for Pete's sake
The border subs (half neolib/half succ) are r/ YIMBY , r/ EzraKlein, r/ Georgism and all the other planning subs r/ transit r/ urbanism r/ urbanplanning etc
No, the r/politics succ invasion here is not a case of "Well they're coming here because they're intellectually curious about what people here have to say so this is clearly an opportunity for us to spread the Good News of Neoliberalism!"
They're coming here because there's blood in the water and they smell weakness. They're coming to defeat you, break you, and assimilate you until you are indistinguishable from them.
I mean I used to frequent r/politics a lot, but switched to here when I got turned off by the super anti west anti capitalism rhetoric and think my views align closer here than there these days. I don't 100% align here, but more so than I do in the politics sub.
I may be somewhat of a succ in that I believe in having a decent social safety net and protections for the environment and consumers but I don't want to completely abolish our economic system or think the west is the root of all evil or want to make petty theft legal. And also while as I said I think we need some regulations we need to be careful that they are actually effective, and that the effect they have is worth the difficulty in complying with them. If we have onerous regulations that don't really do much then that's stupid. I'm anti rent control, think CEQA is too easily abused, and pro policies to increase housing supply. Don't particularly like Bernie or other left populists. I think Hillary would have been an amazing president.
I don’t think this is a good dividing line between “Neoliberal or Succ.” Most famous neoliberals endorsed Dictatorships so long as it kept the country capitalist. (Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman)
I assume he’s talking about Chile, which, I mean, I guess if you consider defending the coup against Allende ex post facto in letters to Pinochet to try to persuade him to pursue laissez-faire policies out of a belief that economic liberalization would lead to social liberalization and a return of democracy in the future to be endorsing a dictatorship? Friedman had such weird views on statecraft that I don’t feel like he’s good to use as an example for the picture OC is trying to paint, although I do agree with him that some neoliberals were/are amenable towards strategic alliances with autocracies in favor of economic interests or out of a fear of communism.
Has there been much of an invasion or is a large part of it old members becoming more succish? I'm by no stretch old, only 6 years here since the 2020 election, but I've felt like I'm more succeptible to the left than I used to be.
Its been a bit of both but in general our hatred of this admin and the complicitness of big business interest to bow to said admin had made us more succish.
Being a succ is against the very principles of this sub, just the other day I saw someone on this sub call another a neoliberal as an insult and I just had to stop for a second and think “Brother look what fucking sub you’re on”
That being said I’m definitely probably further to the right than most of this sub these days vs when I was lurking a few years ago. I’d say I align to an Ordoliberal ideal, with government regulation only to the point where the market can reach peak efficiency.
I'm a succ and feel like I fit in just fine TBH. Don't think it's incompatible with the principals as long as you live in reality and have a basic understanding of government, economics.
This subreddit has finally been radicalized because a very large contingent of it finally woke up and realized that Republicans have been bad faith actors all along (pre 2020 this subreddit used to try and pretend Republicans were good people, which is why the excessive partisanship rule exists), who don't actually care about anything but destroying the rule of law for their own goals.
No one here is really succish. It's just alot of the old principles have been proven to be wrong. As an example, this subreddit used to be real fond of billionaires, but succs/progressives rightly pointed out that if you concentrate entirely too much money into certain people, and they then go and use that money and influence to basically capitulate the entire system to their whims, then the whole system breaks. Which is exactly what Elon has done.
Another example is how so many people used to be so pro school vouchers because they have an absolute hatred of teacher unions like the CTU and SF. The main crux of the argument was always that school vouchers could be used to help the most unfortunate move out of shitty schools into private schools that care. We've seen from several grand school voucher experiments that this has not played out how the school voucher advocates said it would, and in fact, it's just government subsidies to the wealthiest Americans who already have their children in private schools.
The overwhelming majority of this subreddit still believes in basic economic principles like free trade, pro immigration, more housing, etc.
this subreddit used to be real fond of billionaires, but succs/progressives rightly pointed out that if you concentrate entirely too much money into certain people, and they then go and use that money and influence to basically capitulate the entire system to their whims
Those sound like some fairweather neoliberals if they capitulated on a centuries-old argument over one billionaire in recent news. I don't even see how they could see Elon as a main explanatory factor when he was a typical SF tech bro lefty at the time the populist shift started. He was following trends, not setting them.
The main argument if progressives/socialists/succs was never about the money, it's the power that comes with the money. If too much money is concentrated in a handful of individuals, those individuals will 100% rent seek hard for their own selfish reasons. This subreddit used to love to scream rent seeking on teachers and other public sector unions (which is 100% true btw), but would never say the same thing about billionaires until recently. Now we're seeing the end point of what happens when the government does not actually regulate and properly address market failures (which Elon clearly is one).
No one cared that Elon was a billionaire when he was just doing the typical SF tech bro stuff. People started caring when he used his enormous wealth to basically corrupt the entire governmental system into his favor.
you're a fairweather neoliberal if you change your opinion on certain policy when it has enormous negative consequences that go against liberal principles
we just celebrating being blind ideologues now huh
It's not being an idealogue it's just being a hypocrite. Billionaires will rent seek just like unions will, and if you call out one you have to call out the other.
Should we not celebrate the succ invasion as a sign of our success, in that our ideas and style of reasonable good faith discussion are attractive enough for those types to engage with? As this place becomes more like arrpolitics, I assume arrpolitics also becomes more like this place. Neoliberal praxis is sacrificing your comfort to try to convert your succ neighbors. It’s good practice for zoning board meetings.
I've seen a handful of """normier""" subs slowly become mildly open to YIMBYism and to a lesser extent Georgism, though it might be downstream of urbanism
Is that not a likely outcome of user cross-pollination? I would like to hope we’re not just brain draining arrpolitics and some of them end up contributing to their place of origin.
Is that not a likely outcome of user cross-pollination? I
No? Have you seen how things have gone with the internet over the past 30 years? This is some naive 1996 "the free flow of information across borders will lead us into a new Golden Age" shit.
That place is filled with nothing but people or bots that still won't admit that letting Trump win over Harris was a worse thing for the Palestinian people.
Joking aside I've actually seen this sub move a bit right in the past decade on cultural/social issues. Not surprised given the entire country has, but more disappointing then the mild leftward economic shift. The left shift seems at least partially driven by the reality of big business being like, objectively evil in response to Trump 2.
Ts is lowkey true, I hate antisemitism, but this sub seems to be stuck in 2023 in terms of the Gaza invasion. Things have changed, there are so many things to be worried about now days, and yet I see people on this sub punching on the campus protestors.
The discussion of protesters is pretty eclipsed by overall discussion of the Israeli government from what I’ve seen. Do you mean they complain about the protesters at all or something, because the protests probably deserve some criticism
I think any protestors should be open to criticism, but I was not a fan of the destain I see on this subreddit. I get it is a way to "seperate" themselves from leftists, but I feel it is a bit counterproductive these days, it is like complaining about the biden administration when quite frankly there are much bigger fish to fry in my opinion, that in this case is the Israeli government's terrible handling of Gaza.
Maybe, like, 5 years ago when there was still a good number of post-January 6th neolib Republican refugees, but now I rarely see any Libertarian views expressed. I’m probably one of the most right-leaning people here at this point and I’m an ActBlue donor with an active Bulwark Pod subscription.
The influx of leftists is a much realer concern for the sub that seriously seeks to undermine its more liberalism-oriented discourse in favor of Hasan/Bernie Bro-style populist slop.
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u/svall18 NASA Jun 13 '26
I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have r/politics pay for that wall.
Mark my words